Michael Bay takes on the haters

David Konow, 5th September 2012

We recently discussed how certain geek haters declared war against two classic genre remakes: RoboCop and the Ninja Turtles.

The Turtles especially have been getting nothing but grief from the geeks, and you’d think they’d give Michael Bay a break, because after all, he was responsible for the current Transformers series. No such luck, apparently...

Bay, who has never been a shrinking violet, is on the defensive yet again, this time over a leaked screenplay for Turtles that got less than stellar remarks on the ‘Net. Apparently it was a real script, but Bay is now claiming it was ditched a long time ago.

Yes, Cinema Blend notes some fans apparently refused to believe a script that bad could be real, and apparently these fans don’t read a lot of scripts going around in Hollywood. (And why would anybody go through the trouble of writing a fake bad script on purpose)?

As Cinema Blend reports, Bay went on his fan forum and tried to calm everyone down by stating, "The leaked script for Ninja Turtles was written well before I, or anyone at Platinum Dunes, was involved with the project. That script saw the shredder a long time ago. This is tired, old news – Wait for the movie!"

Then another movie site that frequently reviews scripts, Latino Review, mentioned the script was from this year, to which Bay went on the defensive again: "Yes we signed on two years ago to Turtles, but with no deal in place. Deal completed towards end of last year. And yes, that’s how long deals sometimes take. So no work was done on the script. Blame Paramount, not us for the first draft."

Of course, there’s always waiting for the movie to speak for itself, but Turtles has a ways to go before it could potentially meet the finish line. Paramount’s been having a lot of trouble lately with a number of their films, including World War Z, the next G.I. Joe film, which got yanked from the summer line-up, as well as Turtles, now has a target release year of 2014.

And ultimately who knows if Turtles will make it to the finish line? It’s a big potential franchise, but it was also remade fairly recently and didn’t set the world on fire. If Paramount can indeed get it ready by 2014, expect much more banter between Bay and the geek lynch mob to come.